Black slaves outnumber white slaves in Sicily

By the 1490s the enslaved people held in Sicily were more often black than white, and the notaries who wrote them into contracts used the phrase sclavi negri. Sicily had been a slaveholding society for centuries under a succession of rulers, and the people held there came from wherever war and raiding could reach: the Balkans, the Black Sea, North Africa, the lands south of the Sahara. What changed in this decade was the proportion. Captives moving north on the caravan routes across the desert, together with Portuguese trading on the Atlantic coast, arrived in numbers that tipped the balance. Eltis and Richardson use Sicily as a marker for a shift running through the whole Mediterranean world. The timing is the part to hold. The identification of slavery with African skin was already settled in southern Europe in the 1490s, before a single sugar estate existed in the Americas. The Caribbean inherited that assumption ready made.

The island Europeans came to call Hispaniola was Taino country. Something like five hundred thousand people lived there in 1492, organised into five chiefdoms, each under a cacique, feeding themselves mainly on manioc. They had a long standing rivalry with the Carib peoples of the Lesser Antilles, and older scholarship confused them with the Arawak of Trinidad and Guyana, relatives who lived somewhere else entirely. Within a few decades of contact almost none of them were left. Disease did part of the work, forced labour in the mines did more, and Spanish violence finished it. The speed matters as much as the total. Spain destroyed its own workforce faster than it could use it, and the colonists then declared themselves short of hands. Africans were bought to fill the gap. So the first shipment of enslaved people to this island was a direct consequence of the killing that had gone before it. One catastrophe wrote the order for the next.

On 5 December 1492 Columbus came ashore on the island the Spanish would name Hispaniola and declared it the property of the Spanish crown. The act consisted of words spoken in a language nobody present understood, a banner, and a notarial record carried back to Europe. Several hundred thousand Taino were living on the island that afternoon. Nothing in the ceremony required their agreement, their presence, or any knowledge on their part that it had happened. The legal fiction outlived the man who performed it. Spain, and France after it, went on treating the western Atlantic as vacant ground that Europeans could assign to one another by treaty, and every later argument about who owned Saint-Domingue traced back to a document written on that premise. The people already there entered European law as an obstacle to be cleared. Haiti spent the next three hundred and twelve years arguing with a claim made in a single afternoon.

In the same year that Sao Tome was colonised, an expedition under Diego Cao reached the mouth of the river the Portuguese called the Zaire and took a few hostages back to Lisbon. Further voyages went out in 1485 and 1487 with more gifts and more hostages, and each one strengthened the impression that the people on that coast belonged to a large kingdom, called Kongo, whose rulers were unusually willing to talk. By the time of the fourth expedition in 1491 both sides had prepared. A handful of Portuguese had already been living in the Kongo, probably including a priest at Soyo, and Kongolese had been living in Lisbon for some years. That last detail matters. The first sustained contact between Europe and central Africa ran in both directions from the start, and men who had seen Portugal were standing on the beach when the ships that mattered arrived.